Keller on Trump
From a 2019 interview with Peter Wehner for The Atlantic:
Keller said that unlike a generation ago, many evangelicals are not looking to put Christians into power in order to turn the culture back to God; now they are looking for a protector, a champion.
“Both those evangelical strategies are wrong,” Keller told me. “Both of them are about power and saying, How are we going to use power to live life the way we want? They’re not enough about service; they’re not enough about serving the common good.
“The proper cultural strategy is faithful presence within,” he added, “not pulling away from the culture, and not trying to take it over. ‘Faithful presence within’ means being faithful; it means we’re not going to assimilate, [but] we’re going to be distinctively Christian. It’s about an attitude of service, uncompromising in our beliefs, but not withdrawing and not trying to dominate.”
It takes real (and rare) wisdom to navigate between the Scylla and Charybdis of dominance and withdrawal, between control of the culture through political power, which is hardly a biblical archetype, and complete cultural separatism.
